How a Marketing Automation Consultant Can Help

What to Expect from a Marketing Automation Consultant

Aberdeen research reports that companies that adopt marketing automation see 53% higher conversion rates and 3.1% higher annual revenue rates than non-adopters. And according to Gartner, companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6 to 9 months.

A marketing automation consultant helps clients achieve these types of results. And quickly.

They show how to apply technology to improve productivity, increase lead conversions, and scale the company without scaling resources.

But just how do they help? Or how should they help to drive the maximum impact in the least time?

Having done this for more than two decades, I compiled a short list of technology-related actions that deliver the most significant business outcomes. It's not an exhaustive list. But each suggestion delivers exceptional payback.

So, before you advance your MarTech program, consider how the below recommendations can advance your results.

Use This Technology to Acquire More Leads (a lot more)

Marketing automation platforms (MAP) such as Adobe Marketo, Oracle Eloqua and Salesforce Marketing Cloud bring automation, scale and analysis to lead generation campaigns.

But from my experience, I have found that most companies use a small portion of the application's capabilities. A good marketing automation consultant will show how to get more value from your existing investment.

For example, customers are not homogenous. Sending the same offer to all customers will disappoint most. That's why segmentation is needed, and the best segmentation starts with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

These applications can improve campaign engagement and conversions with capabilities such as customer segmentation, contextual communication and personalized messaging.

They can automatically segment prospects beyond demographic and firmographic criteria which are static and poor predictors of buyer intent. These systems leverage far more powerful behavioral attributes gleaned from the buyers' digital footprints and online behaviors.

Then you can step up to more advanced campaigns. These might include account-based marketing, look-alike modeling, retargeting, multi-channel or trigger-based campaigns. When done correctly, these advanced campaigns deliver higher quality leads at a reduced cost per lead.

Lastly, to drive systemic and predictable lead generation you can use the technology to optimize your campaign portfolio.

These apps can systemically test, measure and rank campaigns by buyer engagement, response rates and conversions. Campaign variables such as offers, content, CTAs, and channels are refined for continuous improvement.

The technology measures the performance of all campaigns and advises when to reallocate your budget from low to high performance campaigns in near real-time. The technology identifies the mix of campaigns that deliver the most qualified sales leads at the lowest cost per lead.

Research published in the Marketing Transformation Report found that Best-in-Class marketers (i.e., the top 15 percent) managed more campaigns, more complex campaigns and made more frequent changes to their campaigns than their lower performing peers.

Align Marketing and Sales

To get the most from your marketing technology you need to consider more than just the marketing department.

Forrester research found the benefits of tightly aligned marketing and sales organizations include 32% annual revenue growth, 24% faster revenue growth, and 27% faster profit growth over a three-year period.

The financial upside is big. But that doesn't make sales and marketing alignment easy.

The path to success starts with a shared goal. It's usually a revenue goal. That goal is then followed by shared responsibilities that occur throughout the lead management process.

For example, both groups need to collaborate to define a sales-ready lead. They must agree when a lead should be transferred from marketing to sales. They should also agree when a lead is transferred back to marketing for continued nurturing.

A best practice is to solidify the lead management process and responsibilities in a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The number one reason SLAs fail is lack of enforcement. The number two reason is trying to enforce too much too quickly. A lead management Service Level Agreement best practice is to start small with a few SLA metrics (i.e., lead quality, lead follow-through, lead recycling) in a closely controlled pilot.

It's important to clearly state the intended benefits of the SLA program. You can then follow with education and training for the pilot participants, and frequently review progress and reporting. Measurable results will then drive wider adoption.

Automate Lead Management

For most clients, I find automating the end-to-end lead management process delivers the most significant and sustained revenue impact.

It increases lead conversions, decreases lead leakage and accelerates revenue growth.

But while the revenue impact is big, so is the effort.

Automated lead management consists of up to 8 integrated processes.

Because lead management is a high-volume activity, the eight processes should be integrated, automated, measured and in a state of continuous improvement.

Below are some helpful insights for each step.

Lead Acquisition

Acquired sales leads enter the top of the revenue funnel. However, most funnels are internally focused.

They use seller-centric views that fail to recognize the buyers' process. That's a big mistake given the increasing power that buyers yield.

But it's a problem that can be remedied by aligning the buyer's purchase process with the seller's sales process.

An integrated revenue funnel, such as the one above, better aligns communication, offers, content, and other engagement pursuant to the buyer's position, progress and goals. The buyer will then perceive the seller to be more helpful in their evaluation, credible in solving their problem, and easy to work with.

This alignment will also accelerate the buyer's purchase process and increase the seller's conversions.

Lead Enrichment

Newly acquired leads arrive with a minimal amount of data. That creates a challenge for marketers that want to use data to create customer segments, deliver highly personalized engagement and calculate accurate lead scores.

Third party lead enrichment services can help. These B2B data augmentation providers append a contact or email address with firmographic, demographic and technographic details.

They can also review lead, contact and account data in your MAP or CRM system and flag inaccurate or bogus data. Even better, they can replace erroneous data, remove obsolete data, and merge duplicate records.

Improving lead and customer data quality enables precision campaigns, tight target audiences and much higher campaign conversions.

Lead Scoring

Calculating accurate lead scores helps sellers prioritize their limited time on the best sale opportunities.

Marketing and sales staff have to get together to define a sales-ready lead. It's an iterative process that will improve by reviewing prior period leads and their calculated scores.

Johnny Grow marketing consultants have found the best lead scores are a combination of firmographic data that measure prospect fit and behavioral data that measure prospect interest.

Measuring lead fit generally applies the same criteria that define your ideal customer profile (ICP). For example, you can identify buyer characteristics that align with companies that most often buy your products. This might include company size, industry or location.

Measuring lead interest requires more consideration. This is where you attribute point values to online activities and digital footprints. It allows you to gauge where the prospect is in their purchase journey and when they are ready to speak to a salesperson.

The below illustration shows an example of assigning point values to digital footprints.

Lead score designs are then automatically calculated by your MAP. A best practice we routinely implement is to have the MAP calculate multiple lead scores. This includes a numeric score on a scale of 0 to 100 and a lead temperature score of hot, warm or cold. Comparing these results accelerates learning and scoring refinements.

Check out our lead score and qualification best practices if you want to learn more.

Nurture Campaigns

Most new leads are not sales-ready when acquired. Research findings published in The Marketing Transformation Report reveal that about 26% of acquired leads are sales-ready when received, 49% are not yet sales-ready, and 25% are unqualified.

It's that middle segment of not yet sales-ready leads that is either engaged with nurture campaigns until they become sales-ready or lost to lead leakage. Below is a design schema that shows how to automate this process.

And here's the upside. About 72% of nurtured leads will eventually become sales-ready. That's equivalent to doubling the volume of qualified leads sent to the sales force. It also reduces the cost per lead by half.

Consider our nurture marketing best practices if you want to learn more.

Lead Routing

Once a lead is sales-ready it needs to be immediately forwarded to the right seller. It's an automated process configured between your MAP and CRM system. Below is a diagram showing how the process can be designed.

Sometimes hot leads get cold. A prospect many incur management turnover, budget changes or competing priorities that stop their purchase process until a later day.

That's when the technology should identify the stalled lead and recommend returning it to marketing for continued nurturing until it again demonstrates buy signals. It's a process we call lead recycling. It ensures no lead gets left behind and minimizes lead leakage.

One caution to be aware of. From over two decades of experience I can attest that the lead transfer process is the single biggest opportunity for miscommunication, delay and lead leakage. Plenty of testing and redundancy is needed.

Performance Analytics

No marketing automation consultant advice is complete without an emphasis on performance reporting.

Technology is needed to measure each lead management process and the end-to-end result. Only then can you implement real-time data-driven improvements to increase the volume and speed of lead conversions.

Dashboards are the primary tool to get the right information to the right person at the right time. They bring visibility to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and show what's working and what's not.

One More Thing to Know

Many of the lead management steps build upon each other. So, a weakness in one will negatively impact all others that follow. For example, poor lead enrichment will degrade lead scoring and poor lead scoring will degrade lead routing to the salesforce.

The reliance between steps also means that inefficiencies should be fixed starting at the beginning as improvements will cascade through future steps. You won't realize this benefit if you start with later steps.

Implementing an automated lead conversion program need not be a daunting task. These steps and best practices can be applied individually and incrementally. The most important thing is to get started and make continuous improvements.

Adopt a MarTech Stack

Here's one more recommendation that can deliver a big cost savings impact.

Gartner reports that marketing software accounts for 29% of the department's budget. That makes it the single largest expenditure category. But the Marketing Technology Industry Council advises that "only 12% of marketers are seeing significant value from their technologies."

A MarTech stack can help lower costs and get far more value.

A strategically designed tech stack replaces a hodge podge of standalone systems with a holistic software portfolio. It aligns applications to improve campaign performance, lead acquisitions, lead management, information reporting and other essential functions.

It also maximizes technology investments and future-proofs purchase decisions.

The MarTech landscape is complex, and the volume of applications can make it feel overwhelming.

So, to simplify technology a marketing automation consultant will show how to strategically categorize software into a 3-tier structure. An example is shown below.

A Marketing Automation Consultant Can Help

Fully leveraging technology can be a complex undertaking.

Fortunately, there are partners that can help.

Johnny Grow is one of those partners. Our practitioners have been implementing marketing automation systems and related applications for more than two decades.

We are well versed in designing MarTech stacks, aligning sales and marketing, and automating the lead management process. We are certified in applications such as Adobe and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Our staff of marketing automation consultant specialists bring research-based insights, evidence-based best practices, prescriptive methods, and the expertise to apply technology for business outcomes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly does marketing automation software do?

While there are many technology platforms, they all perform six essential functions (although some clearly perform better than others).

Lead Tracking. The technology tracks anonymous and known visitor traffic and behaviors across channels (i.e., website, email, social networks). It reports prospect and customer browsing patterns, content consumption, online activities, and product or service interests.
Lead Acquisition. The applications use landing pages to convert anonymous visitors to known leads. Techniques such as progressive profiling collect continued lead information. A Lead record is created in the MAP and may be created in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
Lead Scoring. The lead score will be the automated method to continuously measure prospect interest level and alert a salesperson when a prospect reaches buyer readiness. Multiple lead scores are used with ABM campaigns. Service Level Agreements (SLA) are used to ensure lead follow-up and reduce lead leakage.
Nurture Marketing. Each lead is assigned to a nurture campaign for continued engagement. Leads should be categorized by customer segment and interest to deliver highly relevant campaign content. A series of progressive nurture flights are used to stay top of mind, build brand awareness, and make relevant and personalized offers.
Lead Transfer. Triggers are created to alert salespeople when leads become qualified. Sellers are alerted when a prospect requests to speak to salesperson, a lead score is reached, a high purchase propensity activity occurs, and when a salesperson’s existing opportunity or account demonstrates an online buyer activity.
Lead Analytics. Conversion and performance analytics are surfaced in alerts, dashboards and reports for lead activity, content effectiveness, offer conversions, and lead-to-customer conversions. These KPIs roll up to revenue attribution and ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment). This data feeds a Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) plan to ensure steady improvements.

What’s the role of a marketing automation consultant?

The most experienced consultants start with the most important business goals. These include things like acquiring qualified sales leads, routing sales-ready leads to the sales force, measuring sales & marketing alignment, lowering the cost per customer acquisition, and increasing ROI. When measurable goals are solidified, the consultant can define the path to achieve these objectives in the least time, cost and risk.

They then apply technology to automate campaigns, perform real-time campaign optimization, deliver real-time analytics, and continuously improve performance.

The technology can seem overwhelming. So, consultants recommend the specific technologies that will drive the biggest financial impact. To make sense of so many potential applications, they organize them into a MarTech stack.

It’s an integrated platform of applications that collectively improve lead acquisitions, the user experience, campaign execution, process automation, information reporting, and scale.

A tech stack creates a competitive advantage as it defines an overarching architecture that blueprints the technologies needed to acquire, grow and retain more customers.

An effective tech stack replaces a mix of ad hoc and fragmented systems. It defines the fewest technologies to achieve the most business objectives in the least time. It also lowers IT cost and future proofs technology decisions.

One more thing to know. The point of a tech stack is to procure technology in a sequence and pursuant to a plan. Rather than purchasing apps because they look cool or solve the problem of the day, they are procured in a planned order where each app builds upon the prior. It's a tech strategy that will result in less maintenance, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), higher utilization and much higher ROI. Less is more when it comes to technology.

What should my company look for when hiring a marketing automation consultant?

Your advisor should be able to demonstrate expertise with marketing cloud or marketing automation software. This may include advising lead enrichment techniques, advanced lead score calculations, nurture marketing best practices, and campaign attribution methods.

They should be well versed in creating or improving sales & marketing alignment programs. This will include creating service level agreements. And it will improve results by aligning these two organizations with shared goals.

They should share important insights and benchmarks. For example, they should know the conversion rates for each channel in your industry. They should know the Best-in-Class benchmarks for cost per lead and cost per customer acquisition for each type of campaign. They should know nurture campaign response rates. They should know lead-to-revenue conversion rates for every step in the revenue funnel.

When implementing software, they should apply agile, time-boxed execution to achieve predictable outcomes within stated timeframes. This typically occurs by using a prescriptive methodology and industry best practices that provide executional guidance. This guidance should include sequential instructions with prescribed activities, progress milestones, phase gates, performance benchmarks, key metrics and exit criteria.

Most of all they should be marketing experts. Consultants familiar with technology but unfamiliar with the most important business goals will underperform when compared to consultants who are equally versed in business and technology.

One more thing. When discussing fees and results they should not answer your time and cost questions with "it depends." Instead, they should identify defined outcomes, prescribe a repeatable process, state assumptions, and answer your time and cost questions with specifics.

How much does a marketing automation consultant cost?

Professional service fees vary based on the market served, the experience of the professional, and the technology being used. Experienced advisors serving large companies charge an average of $250 to $375 per hour. Advisors serving smaller companies generally charge less. Johnny Grow consultants serve midmarket companies and have significant business and technical experience (more than 26 years' experience on average.) They charge an average of $175 to $225 per hour depending on industry experience and technical skills needed for each specific engagement.

What is the biggest obstacle to hiring a marketing automation consultant?

Getting stuck with inexperienced consultants is the most cited hiring mistake. It frequently happens in one of three ways.

First, many clients are sold by a senior partner or practitioner. However, once the contract is signed, that person has limited participation and the majority of work is delegated to less experienced staff. This increases duration and decreases results.

Second, consulting firms typically make the most margin on younger staff. That creates a financial incentive to assign more of the delivery to less experienced staff. These younger staff are often smart people but without much experience or skills. They are essentially learning on the job and charging their clients for their education. This increases risk and total cost.

Third, many consulting firms only staff customer engagements with employees. That means new client engagements are assigned staff based on availability and not skills. Consulting firms that leverage a network of specialists avoid this mistake.